Azores 2026 - Easing Gently Into Island Life

It was a good sleep.

We awoke to a sunny and cloudless morning in the house of Manuel Cabrinha in the town of Livramento on the island of Sao Miguel. Here, the windows remain open and the few bugs that do live on the island stay in their lanes, while the morning church bells alert you of the time each hour on the hour. Just count the bells to know when it is time to get up.

In Canada I often think of the breakfasts we enjoy in the Azores. They begin with a three minute walk to the Pingo Dolce neighbourhood grocery store to pick up freshly made buns, and my god are they good…and cheap. Six delicious fat buns cost just over one euro. You can also pick up thinly sliced ham, eggs, any of two dozen varieties of cheese, a bag of muesli, local milk, and of course, the sweet local mini bananas that blow those Costa Rican honkers right out of the jungle. Having a small grocery store located within a residential neighbourhood is a concept lost on Canadian city planners, as we’ve been conditioned to drive in our trucks to a Costco or Superstore, buy massive quantities of low quality food, then jam in all into chest freezers in our basements, to be extracted piece by piece over a period of months, or sometimes lost and forgotten in the crumb-covered bottom of the appliance and eventually transferred to a garbage bin. In Livramento, if you are a little less mobile, or short of time in the morning, you can have the bread man leave a daily plastic bag containing fresh buns hanging from your doorknob each morning before 7am. This is what Tio Manuel does. It’s a hell of a good system.

Although the Pingo Doce has most of what you would ever need to eat, we took Ana’s folks for a trip to the large Continental grocery store to pick up some food, then stopped for a look at the always mesmerizing ocean pools in Lagoa, then continued eastward to the Villa Franca marina where we had coffee and tosta mistas beneath the glorious sunshine and 22 degrees of warmth. By the time we returned to Tio Manuel’s house, more of the family had gathered, and we spent the rest of the day eating, drinking and goofing around. Francisco and Cidalia, close family friends, also joined the party and it was a far later night than expected.

Azores 2026 - Arrival in Sao Miguel

Thinking back, the only real good thing about having little kids was it got you to the front of the queue when boarding aircraft, under the “those passengers who need assistance or are traveling with small children” rule. Staff were generally nicer to passengers with kids too, surely out of a sense of pity seeing the immense amount of gear, dogged persistence, and saintly patience it took to travel with your yard apes.

Well, we discovered that traveling with old people works like that too - in our specific case, Ana’s parents. The airport provides free wheelchairs, lets you board first, and upon disembarking in the Azores, they even provided this amazing lift truck that rose up to the rear door, let us walk the oldies into a large cabin with seating and more wheelchairs, gently lowered us to the ground, then were driven VIP-style to the terminal entrance and whizzed right up to the front of the line. Then somehow our bags were the first to plop onto the belt and we were already out of the airport getting family hugs while the rest of the passengers were still queuing up for immigration. See, babies and old people can be cute and useful (at times).

Our evening flight dropped us into the Azores early Saturday morning so our first day was a full one. It’s been just over two years since we were here and each time we visit, the island of San Miguel feels more and more like our second home.

We had a lovely welcome breakfast spread with fresh cheese somebody’s neighbour made the day before, just-baked buns, mini-bananas, sweet orange cake, and grape jam Ana’s uncle Manuel made from the grapes hanging in his backyard. A bunch of the cousins and aunts and uncles were there, gathered around the table, and hit me with their working class, rapid fire Portuguese, making all the hours and weeks I practiced during the lead up to the trip feel pretty much useless as nobody could understand what I was saying and most of what they said, to my ears, sounded like a newly discovered language from the moons of Saturn. It was lovely to see them all again.

When there was a break in the action, Ana and I snuck out for a walk and made our way down to the nearby beach, which is about a ten minute stroll from the house. It was a glorious day, and I was wishing I had ditched the jeans and long-sleeved shirt for shorts and a tee. We stopped for a drink at the Sunset beach bar and bathed in the sunshine and unmistakenly European atmosphere – espresso served with biscuits and a small spoon, square napkins made from non-absorbing paper, great service, tight-fitting steel doors, finely dressed patrons and, best of all, no annoying 20% tip function on the debit machine – you just pay the price and are not required to determine the monetary worth of your server and experience.

After returning to the house, Ana started having a volcanic menopausal eruption in her body so I whisked her back to the beach, now in swimsuits, and we jumped in the salty cool waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Steam rose around her as her skin instantly boiled the seawater, drawing the attention of passing fishes and octopi. We spread our towels on the beautiful black sand and sat to admire rounds of arriving waves as locals bobbed in them.

Ana’s cousin Natercia, made a big lunch for us and we found ourselves around the table again eating and laughing, but now trying to fight off the drowsiness inflicted from the previous night’s rolling and squirming in the airplane seats. We somehow powered through and found enough energy to drive to the nearby town of Rosario for a festival. Azoreans have festivals for everything, usually religious based, but this one was particularly interesting. It was a festival of warm bread and tea. Yep, that’s it, just warm bread and tea. There were hundreds of people there and as the cauldrons of tea appeared, followed by the freshly made bread, a huge queue developed, snaking around the town square. By this time we could barely keep our eyes open so we decided to skip the warm bread and tea and return home to a warm bed and airy humid dreams.